Blog / Reviews

Pearl Primus, "Omowale," Child Returned Home

February 14, 2020 - By Paul Dennis, In Conversation with Stan Sherer and Peggy and Murray Schwartz

(Documentary Poster, Courtesy of the Archive of the American Dance Festival)

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Brew the Locomotion for Whitman's Marvelous Machine

January 2, 2020 - By Marsha Bryant

Massachusetts Reviews: Odes to Lithium

November 8, 2019 - By Allison Bird Treacy

Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books, 2019)

There’s something apt about the fact that Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium arrived in the world in 2019. That’s because this year is the 25^th anniversary of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s landmark book, Prozac Nation, while Kay Redfield Jamison and Annie G. Rogers, psychologists who both blurb Erlichman’s collection, published their books documenting personal experiences of mental illness a year later in 1995. Now, a quarter of a century on, Erlichman’s odes bring a new kind of wonder to our conversations about mental illness, a tenderness not just towards the self, but...

Massachusetts Reviews: Bells for Whitman’s Captain

October 29, 2019 - By Marsha Bryant

What’s an elegy for Abraham Lincoln doing in a 12-ounce beer bottle? The third Walt Whitman tribute in Bell’s Leaves of Grass Series reinvents the poet’s preferred beer style as a confluence of American Black Ale and India Pale Lager. Bringing roasty malts and Michigan hops to lager’s crispness, Bell’s Brewery labels O Captain! My Captain! a Black India-Style Pale Lager. Even with this mouthful of attributes, its mouthfeel is light. This beer isn’t as dark and opaque as a stout, but the head is...

Massachusetts Reviews: : A Partisan Review

October 21, 2019 - By Jim HIcks

Houses from Another Street by Michael Thurston, Leveller's Press, 2019.
 

I have a confession to make, one that will likely get me in trouble. Come to think of it, the water I’m walking into here is even hotter than it normally would be. As it happens, our most senior fiction editor is a noted author of a genre I now confess I’ve never understood: YA fiction. To make matters worse: I was even tempted, when writing this last line, to say “so-called YA fiction,” thus revealing my stupidity as well as ignorance, since the genre I hereby confess to not understanding is also one of the few for which a market actually exists in our...